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In Memoriam and Lycidas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph Sendry
Joseph Sendry*
Affiliation:
Catholic University, Washington, D. C
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Extract

Tennyson's In Memoriam furnishes a case study, a vexed and difficult one, in the persistence of literary tradition. Though it is not, strictly speaking, a pastoral elegy, In Memoriam yet retains unmistakable markings of the traditional form. A. J. Carr, for one, has recently insisted upon the importance of pastoral motifs “to provide the personal themes of In Memoriam with a formal structure responsive to both private instinct and the elegiac traditions.” On the other hand, others as early as A. C. Bradley and as recently as Elton Edward Smith have offered what amounts to the opposite judgment on the significance of the pastoral tradition as a key to the structure of In Memoriam. In Smith's words, “the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 437 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 437 “Tennyson as a Modern Poet,” Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London, 1960), p. 61.

Note 2 in page 437 The Two Voices: A Tennyson Study (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), p. 88. For Bradley's remarks see A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (London, 1902), pp. 101–102.

Note 3 in page 437 F. T. Palgrave, paraphrasing the poet in Hallam Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (New York, 1897), ii, 495.

Note 4 in page 437 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1963), p. 227.

Note 5 in page 437 Memoir, i, 152.

Note 6 in page 437 Letters of Edward FilzGerald, ed. William Aldis Wright (London, 1894), i, 187.

Note 7 in page 437 Bradley, p. 23.

Note 8 in page 438 All quotations from In Memoriam are from the Cambridge Edition of The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. W. J. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 1898). Quotations from Lycidas are from the Columbia Edition of The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, i, Part 1 (New York, 1931).

Note 9 in page 438 Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 116.

Note 10 in page 441 The poet's notes on Section ciii appear in the Eversley Ed., The Works of Tennyson Annotated, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson (London, 1908), iii, 255.

Note 11 in page 442 Selected Essays (Loudon, 1953), pp. 333–334.

Note 12 in page 443 Tennyson Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1948), pp. 115, 116–117.